Never mind the Pope - God save the Church

I'm just off The Jeremy Vine Show  on BBC Radio 2, where I was debating the needs of the Catholic Church. My sparring partner was a young (I think) Englishman who appears to embrace the Church as it is. Maybe it's different in England. In Ireland, the Catholic Church is on the ropes.

Let's, with an effort, leave aside the clerical sexual abuse scandal - not because it doesn't matter but because it has been highlighted already as a ghastly stain on the Church. (Mind you, you're more liable to be abused by a relative than by a Catholic priest.) A number of things about the Catholic Church in Ireland appall me.

1. Its attitude to young people. Or rather non-attitude. Young people of Catholic background very largely find the Church at best boring and irrelevant, at worst cold and repellent. The Church's response? Nothing. Zilch. Rien. I know there are honourable exceptions to this but for the most part, young people leave the Church to the oldies.
2. Democracy. Or rather, non-democracy. From the Pope at the top to the parish priest at grassroots level, there's an obsession with keeping control, making sure those seen as further down the faith ladder don't come tramping where they don't belong. The windows of the Church which John XXIII tried to fling open have been nailed shut. Priests like Tony Flannery, Owen O'Sullivan, Brian D'Arcy have been silenced. Even to discuss topics such as celibacy, women priests, homosexuality is, to use Thatcher's word, out.

3. The liturgy. The Mass for young people particularly, but for older people too, is often a total yawn. Pope Benedict's intervention recently, making sure that jaw-breakers like 'consubstantial' were inserted into the wording, sums it up. And no, I don't know the answer to it all. But I know what I don't like.

I could go on but life is short. Anyone who thinks that by clinging to the orthodox, following the rules 'faithfully', putting your brain in neutral, is deluding themselves.  There are good and even heroic priests  and Catholic people in Ireland. But as an institution, the Catholic Church in Ireland is a mess.

Pope Benedict packs it in

The most telling tweet I read today was from Alastair Campbell. It said “Anyone who thinks religion not relevant to modern life (writes a pro-faith atheist) just look at how Pope announcement is dominating all”. And he was right. When the news of Pope Benedict’s planned retirement broke, Twitter had tweet after tweet after tweet on the subject. I’ve never seen it that one-topic.

So. Am I glad or sad he’s going? I could say ‘sad’, in that I believe he’s a sincere and holy man, and a man of considerable intellect. But my main emotion is one of gladness. Despite his quiet charm (which floored most of Britain that time he visited them) and despite the great charisma of Pope John Paul II, their terms as Pope were not good for the Catholic Church. In the early 1960s, that extraordinary man Pope John XXIII called the Second Vatican Council to, as he put it, open the windows of the Church and allow the fresh air of renewal to invigorate it.  Both John Paul II and Benedict XVI did all they could to close those windows. Dissent, even discussion was forbidden; good and thoughtful people were not allowed even to discuss such burning issues as married priests or the ordination of women. I don’t for a moment believe that either of those steps would remedy all the ills of the Catholic Church, but to block discussion and real involvement by gifted people was misguided and counter-productive. 

So will I feel bad as Pope Benedict rides off into the sunset? Not really. He’s 85 years old. In any other profession to retire at that age would be seen as long overdue. I have no doubt that Benedict did good things in his term of office - among them addressing the issue of child abuse -  but he didn’t do the kind of things that would bring back to the Catholic Church people (particularly young people) who have abandoned it, nor did he encourage structures that would have allowed the Church at grass-roots level to be the people of God rather than the parish priest. The one thing the Catholic Church truly needs is a vigorous and abiding blast of democracy, and neither the present Pope nor the one before provided that. In fact they did all they could to block it. 

The question now is, will the next Pope provide a new beginning? I’d like to think so, except that the overwhelming majority of the College of Cardinals, who vote in Gregory’s successor, have been appointed by John Paul or Gregory. The sign are not good.

Chris, Gerry, the Pope and lies

Funny old thing, lying. When I was a youngster I used read books where Englishmen would blow their top if accused in this way. “Are you calling me a liar, sir??” Pistols at dawn and all that. And of course we were brought up with a catechism which told us that “No reason or motive can excuse a lie”.  Which always presented me with a problem on those occasions a female looked me in the eye and asked “Does my bum look big in this?” 

Ten years ago Chris Huhne got his wife to take a speeding fine for him and lied that she’d been the driver of the car at the time.One thing has led to another, and now from being a runner for the top post with the Lib Dems, he’s had to resign his seat and is probably on his way to prison.   Closer to home and on the back of an opinion poll, the Fianna Fail leader Micheal Martin has told journalists “I have watched Sinn Féin in the North, all they have been about there is getting votes and securing power”. Later on in the same interview he added “I have no interest in just winning votes”.  Would you say Micheal himself believes both those statements?

Which brings us to Gerry Adams and the Pope. Gerry Adams has repeatedly said he wasn’t in the IRA, a statement which the media world  and beyond have declared a lie. And while Pope Pius XII has been denounced by many as anti-Semitic during WW2, a report in today’s Observer suggests that he wasn’t, and in fact arranged for fake baptism certificates to be issued to hundreds of Jews hidden in Italy, got fabricated Vatican documents to 2,000 Jews in Hungary identifying them as Catholics, and was involved with the hiding of 4,000 Jews in convents and monasteries across Italy. Or to put it another way, Pope Pius XII concocted lies about thousands of Jews.

And I haven’t even mentioned the matter of pleading “Not guilty” in court. If you know you’re guilty and say you're not, that’s clearly a lie. But you’ve employed a lawyer to fight your case; if you start by pleading Guilty, the show is over before it’s started.

You see where I’m going with this? Strictly speaking, lies are woven into the fabric of all our lives. Lies can be told to impress the electorate, lies can be told to save lives, lies can be told to protect yourself from prosecution. Not to mention a kick in the teeth should you say “Yes, your bum does look big in that. Enormous, in fact”.

So I do hope the next interviewer to ask Gerry Adams the well-worn “Were you in the IRA?” question will keep those complexities in mind. Even though I'm certain they won’t. And that’s the truth.

Gerry Adams on the Marian Finucane Show

   I caught only part of that interview today of Gerry Adams on the Marian Finucane Show. What I heard followed the usual pattern, much of it about Adams’s past in or not in the IRA. And there was some stuff about him having a holiday home in Donegal, which I gathered by inference is something you’re not supposed to have, and about him having been treated in a private medical clinic in the US, which apparently is something you’re not supposed to do either, and where did you get the big money for that anyway?

But while those were interesting questions and the way Adams dealt with them was interesting, I thought the key moment of the interview was when Adams said a word I don’t think I’ve heard on Finucane’s show before. I can’t remember what the question was but I remember the Sinn Féin president’s answer.

He was talking about the day the British Army came to his family home and arrested, I think he said, his father and his brother. “They wrecked the place completely.  They shit on the couch, they urinated on the curtains, they smashed religious pictures and statues. They wrecked the place completely”.

I’ve put that in quotation marks although I’m not sure if those were his exact words. But that was the essence of what he said. 

I thought it was remarkable because it brought alive, maybe for the first time to a southern audience, what life was like for many nationalists and republicans during the years of the Troubles. Everyone or nearly everyone has a home. And most people have small things - pictures, ornaments, furniture - that they’re fond of and sometimes proud of. What Adams’s sketch of what happened to his parents' home did was ask an unspoken question: How would you react if some people came into your home and did that?  To which he might have added “And how would you feel if 30,000 British soldiers took over South Dublin?” 

I do hope that helps bring home to southern listeners the sense of helpless rage that so many people must have felt, after being paid a visit by British squaddies. Of course, in comparison to the lives that were taken on all sides during the Troubles, the trashing of a house is nothing. But it’s still an interesting question to ponder: How would you react if that happened to your house?

(I know I shouldn’t but my inner teacher demands I do: the past tense of “shit”, Gerry,  is “shat”, not “shit”. Just sayin’, like.) 
Here's the interview link - thanks to Paul Evans : e http://www.rhttp://www.rte.ie/radio1/marian-finucane/

Normal service etc

Apologies if you've recently posted a comment that doesn't show. There's some glitch in the system which I'm hoping will be repaired swiftly.  Meanwhile, take out your 2-minute packet of popcorn, settle back in your two-minute seat and have a good laugh/nod approvingly/ shout obscenities at the clip below...

http://www.channel4.com/programmes/4thoughttv/4od

Michael Noonan: man of analogies

I expect you have an Economics degree. You haven’t? Me neither. Which means we’re probably equally confused by the deal the twenty-six counties has just brought back from Brussels.

Michael Noonan at a press conference  yesterday explained what it was and what it wasn’t.  It wasn’t what Pearse Doherty said it was - kicking the can further down the road, agreeing not to pay off a huge chunk of debt more or less right now but agreeing to pay off a huge chunk of debt several decades later. 

Michael used two homely comparisons that an economic illiterate like myself can at least try to grasp. The first was “Supposing I said to Pearse ‘I’ll lend you €1000 and you can pay me back next month or  in forty years time' - which do you think he’d take?”  I could follow that. Pearse would take the second option, because in forty years time even youthful Pearse mightn’t be around. I had a private thought that Pearse’s children and grandchildren might be around and mightn't thank him, but I pushed that out of my mind, seeing Michael hadn’t mentioned it. 

The other homely analogy was with, yes, Michael’s home. He explained about how he’d bought a house forty or something years ago, and it cost him £3,000. So he paid a manageable mortgage for several decades, but when it came to paying off the principal sum, it was just a month of his wages as a teacher. Inflation, you see, after forty years, making what looks big potatoes forty years ago turn out to be small spuds today.

I found those two analogies helpful as long as I didn’t start thinking around them. The “I lend you €1000” one, for example. Great in one way - but the €1000 is still going to have to be paid off, so I’m saddling my yet-unborn children/grandchildren with my debt.  Mmm. Don’t like the sound of that much. And by the way, if you get a loan from people, don’t they usually ask you to pay interest on it? My bank does, anyway. Funny Michael didn’t mention the interest. He probably forgot, what with all that chatting up and out-manoeuvring all them foreigners.

The one about the house is a good one too - even with the housing crash, we still marvel at the price we paid for our house thirty or forty years ago, compared with what even a modest house costs now. But then I began to think about the many ‘How To Manage Your Money’ columns in weekend magazines that I’d read over the years, and how they’d all urged me to get shot of debt - on my credit card, on my car, on my house - as quickly as possible, because interest piles up the longer you leave it. In fact, I remember doing a tot-up on my own house and discovering that with interest, I was paying more than twice as much for it. And I remember not too long ago - oh happy day! - when  I finally got finished with the goddam mortgage, and the relief of taking that particular financial albatross from around my neck. 

So I was just wondering, like: has Michael done a tot-up of how much money the Irish people will be shelling out in interest over the years? And we’re really talking years and years here - I’ll certainly be dead before the debt is finally paid, and chances are you will be too, except you’ve got a face still spattered with adolescent acne, in which case why aren’t you out having fun instead of reading this?

I’ve thought and thought about it and I’ve decided that there’s a curse on the Irish people. One minute they’re one of the richest countries in the world, the next they’re landing head-first in the financial basement. And it’s going to take until 2056, I think Michael said,  before finally getting out of that basement. So here’s the thing: what did the Irish people do to deserve all this suffering and deprivation, to be handed on from generation to generation? Well, nothing really. It was the banks and the big developers who somehow landed the twenty-six counties’ people in this awful financial debt. So what else would you call it, if  from earning a decent wage you’re suddenly told you’re up against the wall and you and the fruit of your loins will have to start paying huuuuuge sums, even though some other sons-of-bitches ran the debt up, not you? And the government manages to present this information in a way that makes it look like a huge success! 

I think Michael should take on that curse idea as well as the lending-€1000-to-Pearse and his Me-And-My-House story. Blame it all on a wicked fairy, Michael. We’re as likely to believe that as the line we’re presently being spun. 

Scot Nats: from vision to nuts-and-bolts.

Well, well, well. You have to hand it to the Scot Nats. Not only have they screwed an independence referendum out of David Cameron, to happen next year, but they’ve now provided a detailed programme of what would happen until Scotland formally declared itself an independent nation. And that would be? The Spring of 2016. To quote our former President of Ireland: wow. And wow again.

Needless to say,  the opponents of the Scot Nats, the Labour party and what’s left of the Tories, are full of condemnation for this sort of talk. It’s a distraction, they say, from the real concerns people have, which are economic.

Well, if they’re right, the Scottish people will ignore all that planning-for -independence  and let the Scots Nats know so at the polls next year, when their independence referendum is held. Of course, Labour and the Tories in Scotland assume that the Scottish populace are incapable of thinking of and dealing with two things at the same time; that they can be and are concerned for their jobs, for housing, for education - all the bread and butter stuff - while at the same time having a real and passionate interest in whether they should run their own country or not. 

All of this, of course, will have considerable repercussions for us in the north of Ireland. Alex Salmond has given the Scottish population a two or was it three-year run at the independence referendum. If we can manage to  um, screw assent from the lovely Theresa Villiers, then we’d be having our own independent Ireland referendum around, um, Spring of 2016. Should the Scots vote in favour of independence, they will be putting in place their full independence in the same year and at the same time of year that we’ll be (i) Commemorating the men and women of the 1916 Rising; and (ii) Looking across that narrow strip of water and noting how the removal of Scotland will have turned Great Britain into Not-Quite-So-Great Britain. 

All this is predicated on the Scots voting for independence next year. If the polls are to believed, at present 47% of Scots don’t want constitutional change and 32% do.  So are the Scot Nats not counting their cake before the thing is even baked?

Well not necessarily. They have over a year in which to turn around those figures, if as I say they’re accurate. There will be the mother and father of all debates about the issue in Scotland,and assuming that the Scottish people are open-minded and prepared to look at the facts, a year could seem a very very long time in politics, especially for Labour and the Tories. 

Should Scotland vote for independence? I think they should, not because   I’ve done the math, as the Yanks say, but because I think grown-up nations should be allowed to act grow-up. But the worst that could happen from the point of view of pro-independence Scots is that the case for independence will have been looked at carefully by Scots, compared with the present arrangement, and a decision arrived at. That’s so much more adult an approach than dealing in slogans or pointing to media polls.  

And what’s sauce for the Scots goose is surely sauce for the Irish gander?  If the Scots were to make decisions by opinion polls, they’d scrap their plans for implementation of  independence and they’d bin the whole idea of a referendum as well.  But being a sensible people, they know that decisions are best made in the ballot box. And that its verdict, whatever it is, will be respected by all Scots.  

Would it be asking too much that our border poll should follow similar lines and after careful and extended discussion, the choice made by the people and the democratic verdict of the people accepted?  History offers us a dusty answer to that one, I’m afraid.